A type of tabletop or portable speaker systems have become quite common that include being sourced audio program material through Bluetooth as well as USB-connected, docked or an audio cable. The source of the audio might be from any variety of portable electronic device such as a smartphone, tablet computer, portable audio player and the like. Some such systems may be battery operated for portability or may be connected to wall power through a power cable.
There is a trend in the control of electronics to attempt to simplify the user interface. The use of voice recognition is the direction that is currently the most common to address this. There is an additional way to greatly simplify the control of a Tabletop Speaker System (TSS) and that is through the use of physical gestures instead of buttons, dials and sliders. This can be achieved by reducing the number of controls to a single “magic” button and including accelerometer and proximity detection to the TSS. the inclusion of these detectors makes it possible to determine that a user is tapping the case or gesturing (hand movement near the TSS).